Category Archives: Social Movements

Sadly, we haven’t posted in a while. My own excuse is that I’ve been working a lot on a dissertation chapter. I’m presenting this work at the Young Scholars in Social Movements conference at Notre Dame at the beginning of May and have just finished a rather rough draft of that chapter. The abstract:

Scholars and policy makers recognize the need for better and timelier data about contentious collective action, both the peaceful protests that are understood as part of democracy and the violent events that are threats to it. News media provide the only consistent source of information available outside government intelligence agencies and are thus the focus of all scholarly efforts to improve collective action data. Human coding of news sources is time-consuming and thus can never be timely and is necessarily limited to a small number of sources, a small time interval, or a limited set of protest “issues” as captured by particular keywords. There have been a number of attempts to address this need through machine coding of electronic versions of news media, but approaches so far remain less than optimal. The goal of this paper is to outline the steps needed build, test and validate an open-source system for coding protest events from any electronically available news source using advances from natural language processing and machine learning. Such a system should have the effect of increasing the speed and reducing the labor costs associated with identifying and coding collective actions in news sources, thus increasing the timeliness of protest data and reducing biases due to excessive reliance on too few news sources. The system will also be open, available for replication, and extendable by future social movement researchers, and social and computational scientists.

This is very much a work still in progress. There are some tasks which I know immediately need to be done — improving evaluation for the closed-ended coding task, incorporating the open-ended coding, and clarifying the methods. From those of you that do event data work, I would love your feedback. Also if you can think of a witty, Googleable name for the system, I’d love to hear that too.

For my dissertation, I’ve been working on a way to generate new protest event data using principles from natural language processing and machine learning. In the process, I’ve been assessing other datasets to see how well they have captured protest events.

I’ve mused on before on assessing GDELT (currently under reorganized management) for protest events. One of the steps of doing this has been to compare it to the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset. The Dynamics of Collective Action dataset (here thereafter DoCA) is a remarkable undertaking, supervised by some leading names in social movements (Soule, McCarthy, Olzak, and McAdam), wherein their team handcoded 35 years of the New York Times for protest events. Each event record includes not only when and where the event took place (what GDELT includes), but over 90 other variables, including a qualitative description of the event, claims of the protesters, their target, the form of protest, and the groups initiating it.

Pam Oliver, Chaeyoon Lim, and I compared the two datasets by looking at a simple monthly time series of event counts and also did a qualitative comparison of a specific month.

I’m excited to say that Sociological Science, the new general audience open-access sociology journal, has published its first batch of articles. These include a great set of pieces, including one from my collaborator Chaeyoon Lim on network effects and emotional well-being. But the article “The Structure of Online Activism” by Lewis, Gray, and Meierhenrich caught my eye, for obvious reasons.

Laura K. Nelson wrote a nice review of my recent Mobilization article last week for the Mobilizing Ideas blog. She sums of some of the work that I had done in preparing the article and training the machine learning classifier for coding mobilization in the April 6th Movement’s Facebook messages.